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NY Times Op-Ed February 5, 2013
The Global Farmland Rush
By MICHAEL KUGELMAN
WASHINGTON
OVER the last decade, as populations have grown, capital has flowed
across borders and crop yields have leveled off, food-importing nations
and private investors have been securing land abroad to use for
agriculture. Poor governments have embraced these deals, but their
people are in danger of losing their patrimony, not to mention their
sources of food.
According to Oxfam, land equivalent to eight times the size of Britain
was sold or leased worldwide in the last 10 years. In northern
Mozambique, a Brazilian-Japanese venture plans to farm more than 54,000
square miles — an area comparable to Pennsylvania and New Jersey
combined — for food exports. In 2009, a Libyan firm leased 386 square
miles of land from Mali without consulting local communities that had
long used it. In the Philippines, the government is so enthusiastic to
promote agribusiness that it lets foreigners register partnerships with
local investors as domestic corporations.
The commoditization of global agriculture has aggravated the
destabilizing effects of these large-scale land grabs. Investors
typically promise to create local jobs and say that better farming
technologies will produce higher crop yields and improve food security.
However, few of these benefits materialize. For example, as The
Economist reported, a Swiss company promised local farmers 2,000 new
jobs when it acquired a 50-year lease to grow biofuel crops on 154
square miles in Makeni, Sierra Leone; in the first three years, it
produced only 50.
Many investors, in fact, use their own labor force, not local workers,
and few share their technology and expertise. Moreover, about two-thirds
of foreign investors in developing countries expect to sell their
harvests elsewhere. These exports may not even be for human consumption.
In 2008 in Sudan, the United Arab Emirates was growing sorghum, a staple
of the Sudanese diet, to feed camels back home.
Much of the land being acquired is in conflict-prone countries. One of
the largest deals — the acquisition by investors led by the Saudi
Binladin Group of some 4,600 square miles in Indonesia — was put on hold
because the area, in Papua, was torn by strife.
The prospects for conflict are heightened by legal uncertainties. Often,
an absence of authoritative land registration and titles makes it easy
for foreign investors, with the connivance of host governments, to
secure land that local communities have long depended upon, even if they
cannot demonstrate formal ownership. About 500 million sub-Saharan
Africans rely on such communally held land, and land sales can be
devastating, as in Mali. Access to food is often cut off, livelihoods
are shattered and communities are uprooted.
Not surprisingly, the land sales provoke protests and then repression.
Last year, in Cambodia, where 55 percent of arable land has been
acquired by domestic and foreign agribusiness interests, the authorities
killed an activist, a journalist and a teenage girl facing eviction;
jailed other activists, and harassed politically active Buddhist monks.
To be sure, financiers have invested in farmland for centuries: Ancient
Romans acquired assets in North Africa, just as American fruit companies
secured plantations in Central America a century ago. But today’s
transactions are far bigger. Nearly 200 private equity firms are
expected to have almost $30 billion in private capital invested by 2015.
Some speculators just sit on high-value land they have acquired without
cultivating it. In many traditional communities, this feels like a
desecration, a violation of land’s purpose and meaning. That kind of
capitalist disregard can set the stage for pitched battles over land
that investors see as uninhabited, but that local communities cherish as
a source of food, water and medicine, or venerate as ancestral burial
grounds.
The chief drivers of the global farmland race — population growth, food
and energy demand, volatile commodity prices, land and water shortages —
won’t slow anytime soon. Neither will extreme weather events and other
effects of climate change on natural resources.
In theory, host countries could limit how much land can be acquired by
foreigners, or require that a minimum portion of harvests be sold in
local markets. Argentina and Brazil have announced measures to limit or
ban new land concessions. But investors use their wealth and their own
governments’ power to impede regulation. Host governments should
establish better land registration practices and enact safeguards
against the displacement of their citizens. The World Bank and other
international entities must ensure that their development projects are
free from the taint of exploitative practices.
Of course, this will be difficult because so many host governments are
riddled with corruption and prioritize profit-making land deals over the
needs of their populations. Cambodia, Laos and Sudan — all sites of
transnational land purchases — are among the world’s 20 most corrupt
nations, according to Transparency International.
“Buy land, they’re not making it anymore,” is a quotation often
attributed to Mark Twain. These days, that advice is being heeded all
too well.
Michael Kugelman, a senior program associate at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, is co-editor of “The Global Farms
Race: Land Grabs, Agricultural Investment, and the Scramble for Food
Security.”
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